


freezing hands, lovers blaze

by Euphorion



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Banter, Canon Compliant, Dorian Hates Himself, Dragons, F/F, Friends With Benefits To Lovers, M/M, Oral Sex, Post-Demands of the Qun, Romance, i'm so glad that was already a tag, no one is good at feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-04 23:26:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14031159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euphorion/pseuds/Euphorion
Summary: Bull raised his head and caught Dorian staring at him, his remaining eye shining in the gathering dusk. The edge of his wide mouth curled up, and he leaned back against the crates they’d stacked up as a makeshift wind-break. “Like what you see?”“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dorian snapped, the response to his goading almost unthinking these days. Usually the brush-off would shut him up, leaving Dorian to keep thinking about him without him getting in the way.Not today. Bull ran a wide-palmed hand up one of his long horns, maybe checking it for cold damage. “You know,” he said, “you’ve got this whole picture of the Qunari in your head as this unknowable, forbidden thing.” His smirk grew. “And you love doing forbidden things.”Dorian clenched his jaw and ran a hand down the length of his staff in an unconscious mirroring, keeping his composure. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”Bull cocked his head and said, quieter, as if Adaar could help but overhear, “my door’s always open. That’s all I’m saying.”





	freezing hands, lovers blaze

Even the ground that wasn’t covered in a treacherous three inches of snow cracked and shattered unnaturally under Dorian’s boots. He let out a sigh and watched it float away over the heads of his companions: Sera was kneeling and striking her flint, thank the gods; he’d grown to hate inches of snow almost more than feet of snow. There was nothing worse than sinking in it up to your knees, it was true, but at least the Inquisitor knew that too and occasionally allowed them to wait for the weak winter sun to do its work. In weather like this she seemed almost more driven, the winds at her back.

She had her head bent now and her horns together with Bull’s on the other side of Sera’s incipient fire, poring over some map where she’d marked the weird, whispering shards of glass they’d been hunting for a while. At Solas’ behest, Dorian thought; secretly, he was glad Adaar’s other occult advisor already had her looking into them. He was fascinated himself, and it probably wouldn’t look good for her blood mage to prompt her to chase after unknown magics. Her  _Tevinter_ blood mage, at that. Vashoth or no, she had very little reason to trust him.

And yet, it seemed, she did. He studied her and Bull as the light of the fire licked up their faces; Adaar’s carefully painted with her Vitaar, brilliant yellow across the deep red of her skin, Bull’s broad and scarred. They  _both_ trusted him, in these frozen wilds, with a staff at their back, unguarded as they slept. For Adaar it made more sense. They’d shared an impossible jaunt to a terrible future, and she’d accompanied him to confront his father after uncovering his notes to Mother Giselle. Friendship and loyalty were not things either of them was used to, but he felt them both settling into them, steadily if awkwardly. But Bull?

Bull, who wore his Tal-Vashoth status like someone proud of a new wound, open and raw, who had been raised to hate Dorian with the same fervor that Dorian should hate him? Bull, who even before he was cast out for the cardinal sin of caring about his friends had treated Dorian like a person, not an enemy combatant, who had met his confusion and questioning with jokes and flirtations, as if Dorian were a grumpy fellow patron at a bar, not a representative of the other side of a centuries-old war? Dorian had attempted to uncover the secret resentment he was certain the Qunari spy harbored for him time and again, but Bull seemed impossibly consistent. Dorian knew spies. He’d met spies, he’d  _fucked_ spies, and all of them had layers of opinion, espoused or confessed in various publics and privacies. Not—solid. And not at all quick to trust.

Bull raised his head and caught Dorian staring at him, his remaining eye shining in the gathering dusk. The edge of his wide mouth curled up, and he leaned back against the crates they’d stacked up as a makeshift wind-break. “Like what you see?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dorian snapped, the response to his goading almost unthinking these days. Usually the brush-off would shut him up, leaving Dorian to keep thinking about him without him getting in the way.

Not today. Bull ran a wide-palmed hand up one of his long horns, maybe checking it for cold damage. “You know,” he said, “you’ve got this whole picture of the Qunari in your head as this unknowable, forbidden thing.” His smirk grew. “And you love doing forbidden things.”

Dorian clenched his jaw and ran a hand down the length of his staff in an unconscious mirroring, keeping his composure. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

Bull cocked his head and said, quieter, as if Adaar could help but overhear, “my door’s always open. That’s all I’m saying.”

Dorian bit his lip, hard, at the open invitation—not just in his words, but in his face, his eyes flickering down Dorian’s stiff, braced-against the cold body, his own hips canted and shoulders relaxed. It was a posture that asked for someone to fold into his arms. “You’re impossible,” Dorian managed, and tried to stop thinking about how at the very least Bull must be so goddamn warm.

He succeeded, until he was curled into his bedroll in a tent with much too-thin walls, listening to the wailing winds coming down off the mountain and trying not to clench his jaw so hard he cracked all his teeth. Then he was in desperate search for any hope of warmth at all, even a mental one, even one that he knew in the morning would make everything harder. He thought about slipping out of his tent and across the banked remnants of the fire, testing Bull’s door to see if his words were anything other than teasing. Thought about slipping inside, pressing himself all against Bull’s side, running his hands over Bull’s broad chest, freed from his shoulder harness, thought about tracing his scars with his fingers til Bull caught his hand and slipped them between his wide, warm lips instead—

He muttered a curse to himself and mentally revised: in the morning this would make everything  _more difficult,_ it was making everything  _harder_ now.

It was a joke Bull would have made, and somehow that was what got him up and out of his bedroll and into his boots, stomping across the space between their tents before he could think better of it. Maybe this would get Bull out of his system and out of his fucking sense of humor.

The flaps of Bull’s tent were down—anything else would be madness, in this weather—but the ties were loose, simple bows rather than the sailor’s knots Dorian knew Bull was well versed in. This was it, then: the freezing winter version of “my door is open.” He took a breath, cast a look heavenward toward distant, glorious stars, and stepped inside.

Bull was a formless mass of darkness inside, but he’d taken less than a step before it shifted, not laconic and welcoming like he’d imagined but immediately alert and on guard, and Dorian realized he must look like nothing but a shadowy intruder. He quickly summoned a small mage light, setting it to hover above his shoulder, and Bull visibly relaxed, though his eyes were wide. “Dorian,” he said, voice even rougher than usual with sleep. “Maker, you scared the hell out of me.”

Dorian raised an eyebrow at him, his stomach coiling with a nervousness he somehow hadn’t expected. “I can go, if your invitation earlier was just your usual blather.”

Bull stared at him for another moment, and then chuckled, something low and disbelieving. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “No, stay.”

He held out a hand, and, after a moment’s hesitation, Dorian took it. Bull drew him down, inexorable, til their faces were inches apart. “None of my blather is just blather,” he said, and kissed him.

It was slow and surprisingly sweet, as if Bull were confirming something, and Dorian returned it with an eagerness that surprised himself. It had been too long since he’d been kissed, and longer still since he’d been kissed like it was anything but an amuse bouche for the main course. Bull kissed him twice, in no hurry at all, and then pulled back to mutter against his cheek, “though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised it was the forbidden fruit angle that finally got you in here.”

Dorian shook his head, but nudged along Bull’s jaw so he knew it wasn’t about the kissing. “That’s not it,” he said, as Bull’s hands skimmed down his arms. “It’s just too damn cold to sleep alone.”

He leaned in and latched his teeth to the thick tendon running down Bull’s throat under his ear, and Bull let out a sigh that terminated in a growl. “No argument from me,” he muttered, and shifted in his bedroll to allow Dorian in.

Once they were pressed fully together it really was amazing how warm Bull was, but also how—big, how muscled, how undeniably  _strong_. He spent a dizzying moment remembering accidentally proposing Bull tie him up— _I’d buy you dinner first—_ and this strength, and the sailor’s skill with rope, and then chided himself. That was the kind of thinking that led to  _next time,_ and there wasn’t going to  _be_ a next time

He ran a hand up Bull’s leg, feeling the chiseled muscle of his thigh shift as he walked his fingers higher. “So,” he murmured in his ear, “what is it about Qunari that you were so eager to show me?”

Bull huffed a laugh into his hair and knocked his jaw sideways so he could breathe against Dorian’s ear in turn, “you get straight to the point, don’t you. Expected a fancy noble like you to stand a little more on ceremony.”

He took Dorian’s earlobe between his teeth, and Dorian said breathlessly, “weren’t you the one who once described fucking as like going to the  _healer—_ ” Bull bit down, and Dorian arched embarrassingly against him, getting immediate revenge by cupping Bull through his stupid hideous trousers, or  _attempting_ to, settling for curling his fingers around him.

Bull grunted. “That was when I had to live under the Qun,” he said, and then did something with his thighs and his shoulders and suddenly they were flipped, with Dorian on his back and Bull over him, grabbing his wrists with one hand and pinning his hips between his knees. Dorian felt his whole body flush, and was certain that if there had been enough light Bull would have seen it, spreading all the way down his chest where his sleeping-shirt had fallen open. Bull’s gaze followed its path down his body anyway, as if he could sense the heat of it, as if he could smell the blood as it rushed downward. “Now,” he said slowly, pulling Dorian’s arms up above his head like he was drawing a bow, “I get to have fun.”

 _Fuck,_ thought Dorian as Bull leaned down to nudge his shirt open and close his warm lips over Dorian’s nipple. He knew he had to keep his voice down or the others would hear and then he’d never hear the end of it, but he couldn’t stop himself entirely—he’d always believed in encouragement for good behavior, and  _vishante kaffas_ did he approve of whatever Bull was doing with his absolutely delicious tongue. “Nnh,  _yes._ ”

Bull was still holding his hands above his head as he worked his way lower—gods, the  _reach_ on his man—and he used his free hand to open Dorian’s belts with a dexterity that shouldn’t have surprised Dorian but did. “Now who’s—getting right to the point— _oh.”_

He could feel Bull grin against his stomach as he twisted, trying to get more friction on the casual palm Bull had wrapped around him, tantalizingly loose. “Wish we were somewhere with walls,” Bull murmured conversationally. “I like hearing you talk.”

“Could’ve, mm, fooled me,” Dorian couldn’t help but shoot back, and then gasped as cold air hit his suddenly bare legs. Bull finished stripping off his trousers and hurriedly pulled the blankets back around them, pulling them up over his head like a second tent. He released Dorian’s wrists at last, and Dorian barely had time for a flash of disappointment before Bull had both hands under this thighs, pushing his legs upward and folding Dorian in half. Dorian wasn’t resisting but even so the way Bull effortlessly manhandled him was dizzying, and he gnawed on his lips to keep from moaning as Bull sank his teeth—slow, but  _hard—_ into the underside of his thigh. He  _did_ moan when Bull pulled off and ran his tongue around the place his teeth had been, probing and flickering against his sensitive skin. It would leave a bruise, he could tell already, and the thought of being able to feel it for days to come and flash back to this place—this utterly overwhelming place of desperate cold and squirming, needy heat, pinned in place by the full weight of the Iron Bull’s attention—made his untouched cock twitch against nothing.

Bull noticed and laughed against the slick skin of his thigh. He parted Dorian’s legs and let them fall ungracefully around his head—one of them ending up on a shoulder and the other caught in the crook of one horn; Dorian took a distracted moment to run his calf over it and then bent his knee to prop it up more comfortably. There was a kind of odd, warm roughness to it that was pleasant against the arch of his foot. And then Bull was leaning down, one palm flat on Dorian’s stomach, the other guiding Dorian’s cock between his lips.

Dorian flailed out an arm and shoved a pillow against his face to keep from screaming. The mage light wobbled, flared, and went out.

+

He roused the next morning to the sounds of Bull’s laughter, shortly followed up by Sera’s sharp, amused storyteller patter, and realized with a shock that he was still in Bull’s  _bed,_ and if Sera was up Adaar was up, and they were going to watch him stumble out of  _Bull’s tent_ without any of his hair oils or his comb or his mirror—gods only  _knew_ what a mess his face was, Maker, despite what he’d said the night before he’d never meant to  _sleep_ here, certainly not until dawn—

He was still casting about for his clothes, refusing to leave the safety of his cocoon of blankets until he had them all, when he noticed something odd. The ties at the front of Bull’s tent were tied tight—double-knotted with care—but the ties at the back, away from the fire and prying eyes, were bows.

Dorian blinked, and checked again. Well. That was—surprisingly decent of him.

He gathered his things, dressed, and cast a quick, unobtrusive spell to lend himself a cat’s grace and silence as he undid the back flaps of Bull’s tent and slipped the few feet across the snows to his own, not daring to look at the fire to see if Adaar or the others had seen him. They didn’t call out, so he was confident enough to slip back again, leaving Bull a small token of appreciation of the night's pleasure—and, a little bit, for his consideration in the matter of the tent flaps—before returning to his own tent and continuing with his morning libations.

It took him nearly two whole days to regret his decision.

They had diverted from their search for the shards to track down some red Templars, making their way across the newly-constructed bridge over Judicael’s Crossing. There was something on the wind that Dorian didn’t like, a tinge of cold that didn’t feel unnatural so much as it felt….more than. Nature, elevated. He was just trying to get more of a handle on the taste of it when he was interrupted.

“So, Dorian,” said Bull, studiedly casual, “about the other night.”

Dorian froze, flicking his eyes at Bull in what he hoped was a glare and not abject terror. “I should have known discretion wasn’t your strong suit.”

Bull’s voice was amused, and Dorian tried not to remember what his grin felt like against his thighs. “You left silk underthings in my tent,” he said. Behind him, Dorian saw Sera waggling her eyebrows in an absolutely vulgar way at Adaar, who looked like she might be holding back laughter. Bull continued, something in his eye letting Dorian know that he knew exactly the pantomime happening behind him, and he was enjoying it. “Was it a gift, or an excuse to repeat the experience?”

Dorian grit his teeth. Fine, he thought,  _fine,_ if this were the price he was to pay for giving into temptation so be it. He had paid far worse for far less satisfaction for the greater part of his life. “If you insist upon leaving your door open,” he hissed, ignoring his startled friends, “who knows, I may or may not come.”

Bull’s eye glinted, and he started to respond, but then stopped, raising his chin sharply and sniffing the wind. “This smells like dragon territory.”

Dorian nodded, the hints he’d caught in the wind earlier making sudden sense. “Ice dragon,” he confirmed. He could feel it, now, its mind drumming heavy wings against his. It wasn’t aware of them, yet, but it was only a matter of time.

Adaar was already halfway up the frozen set of stairs that wound upward from the end of the bridge. “Well?” she said, looking back at Bull. “You coming?”

Bull grinned wide and took off running, laughing as she fell into step with him. “I ever tell you how much I love you, Boss?”

“Only when you’re drunk,” she replied easily, and Dorian felt—odd, off-kilter, like he’d taken half a step and never put his foot down, and somehow closed out of an easy intimacy he’d never understood. Maybe he was wrong about Adaar - maybe friendship and trust came easy to her, and only came slow with him.

He hung back as they crested the tower, watching the dragon slice sideways through the sky above them. Bull and the Inquisitor drew their weapons, Sera taking up a position atop one of the crenellations to his left, and Dorian undid the catches on his staff with a twist of his fingers, his barriers raising around himself and the others even before its end hit the stone at his side. He gripped it hard as the dragon pulled up and raked its talons downward in an attempt to skewer the pair of Qunari before it landed. It pulled back with a hiss as Adaar swung her broadsword, severing one of its claws clean through, and landed in a shrieking mass only a few feet away from them, ice crackling between its jaws.

Dorian took a few rapid steps forward, pulling on all the warmth he could muster—Sera’s campfire the night before, both when it was new, roaring and hissing with boar fat, and later, banked and eternal; the last time they were in the hissing wastes, distant as it seemed now, the skin on Dorian’s shoulder’s pink and smarting with heat; further back, the fires in his library rooms at Skyhold; further back, the honey-gold, inescapable warmth of the Tevinter sun, layered cloying over his entire life til he’d cut himself away with the sharpest knife he could find.

Flames roared from his staff, slamming into the side of the dragon’s head in a great cloud of steam. Bull pressed the advantage, swinging his axe in a great upward arc that took a slice out of the side of the dragon’s neck. It didn’t bleed like it should have—it was sluggish, and spread somehow through its skin in a patch rather than a line, like someone had bled into freezing water rather than cutting flesh. Dorian continued his half-run, his other hand gathering invisible threads—Cole’s frenzied knifework, Sera’s quick, irreverent laughter, the free, unthinking speed of Adaar’s stallion—and throwing them around Bull like a net. He heard the Qunari laugh as he shrugged the spell around his shoulders, flipping the axe in a faster, more certain arc and slicing again, again at its snakelike throat.

Adaar was drawing its attention, inflicting long, shallow cuts across its face, aiming for its eyes, but Dorian could see it readying another ice blast, and worse, he could see the wounds Bull was inflicting closing up as the pure cold coiled through them. He was getting close enough now to feel it, that deep cold; he almost laughed at himself for thinking he could ever have known what that was like before now, wondered a little crazily if the Old Gods had sent this creature to punish his hubris and teach him the true meaning of winter.

He tried to bring back his thoughts of heat, but the sands of the hissing wastes turned to snow in his mind, the drumbeat of dragon wings getting tangled up with the beat of his heart that his magic danced to. He gripped his staff harder and reinforced the shields around his friends, called to their blood—warmer, stronger than his own—to rise in them and strengthen their limbs. He could feel Sera, herself a bastion of quick-shifting flame, dancing around the back of the creature, and looked up to see the absolute mess that she was making of its wings.

Adaar must have seen it as well. “Bull,” she shouted, “concentrate your strikes in one place, like you’re felling a tree. Sera’s grounded it, so all we have to do—”

The dragon reared back, its jaws flashing open, and Dorian cried a warning the Inquisitor didn’t need. She threw herself forward into a roll, passing safely under the barrage of needle-sharp crystals spat viciously from its mouth. Bull should have been able to do the same, with Dorian’s haste upon him, but he didn’t even try—he pressed forward instead, redoubling his efforts, reopening the slashes in the dragon’s throat, his entire left side riddled with iridescent knives of ice, blood pouring into his boot and making the stone slick beneath him.

Anger—sudden and overwhelming—made Dorian’s heart sing in his ears, and moving unthinkingly, moving because he had to, he planted his staff, using it as a vault, and leapt lightly onto the dragon’s back. Sera had hamstrung it as well as shredding its wings, he noticed with a part of himself entirely separate from calm, singing fury, and that part of him was impressed. Distantly, he remembered the braziers bracketing Alexius on his throne in a future he and Adaar had torn down. Distantly, he remembered the fires his father had dripped his blood into, calling on a different future, one that Dorian had destroyed in an entirely different way. Distantly, he remembered watching Haven burn. And atop it all, a thousand times more immediate, he placed the heat of Bull’s hands and his mouth and his flickering tongue.

Shifting his footing as if he were aboard a ship in a roiling storm, he slammed the end of his staff into the fissure Bull had created in the thing’s neck, and released his rage.

When the roaring in his ears cleared he was standing on blackened stone—no, he corrected himself after a moment, on blackened bone; the thing’s spine lay in front of and behind him like a path he had stopped walking for a moment, perched windingly atop its ribs; its skull lolled grotesquely half-skinned, half-frozen a few feet away.

Bull was staring up at him, streaked with ash and blood. He was grinning, his chest heaving, his horns still tipped in frost and his eye shining gold. “ _Taarsidath-an halsaam_ ,” he murmured, and Dorian had no idea what that meant and the only thing he could think of to say was to tell him how fucking _magnificent_ he looked, and how absolutely  _stupid_ he was, and he stood there staring, unable to decide between them, and Bull didn’t look away.

“Bull,” Adaar said at last, “you’re losing a lot of blood.”

Bull made a dismissive noise, finally looking at her. “I'm fine, Boss.”

“Sure,” she agreed. “But you're losing a lot of blood.” She handed him a potion - elfroot and rashvine, vile but clotting - and he downed it with a grunt, letting her duck under his arm and help support his weight.

Dorian hopped down from the dragon’s ribcage and landed swaying, suddenly lightheaded. Sera appeared from nowhere to catch him. “Hey now,” she said, “no point taking down something like that if you’re too passed out to gloat.”

He leaned on her gratefully. “Andraste,” he said, watching Bull and Adaar move carefully back down the steps. “What a picture we make.”

Adaar chuckled. “We're going back to Skyhold. I'll have Josephine send people to collect the bones, I'm sure they'll want to celebrate our victory.” She turned to smile at Dorian. “We won’t tell the official artists how we left the scene, hm?”

“I am never to be depicted as anything but  _perfectly_ coiffed,” he agreed seriously. “It's in my Inquisition contract.”

“Shame,” he heard Bul muttered, but piecing together the  _why_ on that one seemed so much effort when he could just let Sera guide him home instead.

The journey back to Skyhold wasn’t long—they returned to their camp at the Tower of Bone and the Inquisition soldiers there outfitted them with an supply wagon and a pair of fast horses. Dorian collapsed back against a crate of shimmering dawnstone. Maybe there were some perks to this whole being a part of a wide-ranging extra-national military organization thing after all.

Bull was settled opposite him, similarly propped up on supplies, and Adaar checked to make sure his bleeding had slowed before joining Sera up by the driver. The wagon jolted, and then they were on their way.

Dorian closed his eyes, letting the steady motion of horse and wheel carry away the tension in his back, the ache in his head. He was certain he didn’t actually sleep, but when he opened his eyes again it was to a sun vastly shifted in the sky and the sound of Bull’s harsh, shuddering breathing.

He ran a hand across his eyes and sat up, looking over to see Bull fumbling with a poultice, attempting to place it around ribs he could barely see with fingers slick with blood.

“ _Vishante kaffas,_ ” Dorian hissed at him, crossing the wagon in a single stride. “Idiot, let me—”

Bull surrendered the poultice to him, blinking, and Dorian smoothed it carefully across his ribs, then took another from the stack beside him, spreading it up his chest and around his shoulder. He could feel the beat of Bull’s heart under his palm for a moment, and let his fingers linger there while raising his eyes. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

Bull raised his uninjured shoulder in a shrug. “Seemed like you needed the sleep.” He looked dazed, likely faint from blood loss, and his gaze kept slipping around Dorian’s face, catching on his mouth, his brows drawn like he was having to read Dorian’s lips as well as listen.

Dorian sat back on his knees, scowling at him. “Is this how you are every time you get hurt, or do you let your Chargers take care of you?”

Bull licked his lips, and then leered. “You wanna take care of me?”

Dorian checked the edges of the poultices again, making sure they’d sealed to his skin properly even with the blood everywhere. “Not particularly, no,” he said, deliberately misunderstanding, but touched his jaw to soften it, passing as much healing as he had in him—not much on his good days, and even less when he’d expended himself so fully—through the brush of his fingers for good measure. “Get some rest.”

He straightened and tottered back to his corner, closing his eyes again. After a moment he heard Bull shift. “Dorian. Thanks.”

He hummed, not wanting to open his eyes and lose the tenuous grasp he had on sleep.

+

They’d been back at Skyhold near a week before he let his feet take him to Bull’s rooms. He bathed thoroughly and dressed for the occasion in a loose shirt and laced trousers, attractive but easy to remove, and took care with his hair and nails, darkening his lashes a bit more than usual. There would be nothing worse than finally giving in to his own urges only to be met with disinterest.

Bull was reading. It shouldn’t have surprised him—he knew a lot of people underestimated the spy’s intelligence, but Dorian had never been one of them. But it seemed so small, somehow, it.

He paused a few paces from Bull’s open door and laughed softly to himself, feeling foolish. Somehow in the days since he’d seen his companion he’d allowed his worry and his desire to combine and build a picture of Bull as something - wild, consuming, a force of nature. A whirlpool that would draw him in and toss him emptied onto land, and here he was, sitting in a low, Qunari-style bed, quiet and grey-gold in the torchlight, reading.

He resumed his quiet approach, and Bull looked up from his book. He raised his eyebrows, slipping a bookmark between the pages. “Dorian.”

His voice didn’t rise, but there was a question in his eye.

Dorian lifted his chin, a little challenging, in a way that he knew opened the length of his throat to the firelight. “Your door was open.”

Bull smirked, and Dorian could tell he’d seen the motion for what it was, and then flicked his eyes up and down Dorian’s body, deliberate. It was comforting to be able to see the whole process laid bare, to know that his overture was being accepted and understood before it was answered. To know that they both were aware of the steps of this dance.

Bull put the book aside. “Why don't you close it?” He suggested, his voice shifted low.

Dorian did so, his back to Bull, and then paused. Turning his head so he could watch the Qunari from the corner of his eye, he started undoing the buttons on his shirt, letting it slide soft off his shoulders. Bull made a low, appreciative noise, his gaze sliding down the curve of his spine, and Dorian smiled at him, starting to undo the ties on his trousers.

Suddenly Bull was behind him, crowding him up against the door. He wrapped Dorian in his arms, sliding one huge hand across his stomach to help Dorian’s suddenly fumbling fingers with his trousers and running the other slow and deliberate up his chest, pulling him back against his broad chest and finally curling gentle around his throat.

Dorian sighed, surrendering the task of getting his trousers the rest of the way off to Bull and raising a hand to cup his face instead, the other bracing himself against the door as Bull threatened to lift him off his feet.  He let his eyes slip closed, his fingers tracing the rough curve of his jaw; perhaps at his urging, Bull curled his head around to mouth at and kiss his throat.

“Sorry if I interrupted your little show,” he murmured against Dorian's ear. His fingers scraped down Dorian’s skin below his navel, lower, dipping beneath cloth, curling into the hair there but not quite touching his rapidly hardening cock and just. Holding. It was teasing and  _wildly_ possessive and it made Dorian’s hips twist sharply. Bull licked a long stripe up his throat and scraped his teeth over the shell of his ear. “Hn. I'm not so great at looking without touching.”

“The point,” Dorian gasped, furious at how easily Bull made him breathless, “was to give you a show so you wouldn't leave bed and further injure yourself.”

He could feel Bull pause, and then smile against his skin—not a smirk or a grin, but a small smile Dorian couldn’t quite fit to his face in his mind. Warm and a little bit surprised. Bull pulled it away from his throat before it became unbearable, leaning up to kiss his cheek. “I'm fine,” he said. “Thanks.”

Dorian huffed and rolled his eyes, feeling too warm and off-balance, their dance suddenly turning a direction he didn’t expect and couldn’t quite read. He shrugged and squirmed his way out of his trousers, kicking them off, and pressed himself deliberately back against Bull, shifting his hips so the silk of his underwear slid against the heavy length of Bull’s cock, still covered.

“Shit,” Bull said, voice appreciative.

Dorian turned his head to bite at his jaw. “Come on, then,” he urged. “You've ruined my plan, show me yours.”

“Gladly.” Bull’s teeth closed around the nape of his neck, gentle, but animal instinct sent a thrill of fear along the edge of Dorian’s pleasure nonetheless, heightening it. He steadied himself with both hands, his fingers flexing against the wood of the door in front of him, as Bull’s mouth moved down the curve of his spine, kissing and sucking and scraping his teeth over the skin of Dorian’s lower back, the scars and dimples at the small of it. One hand settled on Dorian’s hip, the other sliding slow under the silk of his undergarments to cup and squeeze his ass.

“Now that,” Bull rumbled appreciatively, “is a handful.”

Dorian scoffed at him, about to retort, but Bull kept going, his fingers caressing the inside of Dorian’s thighs, tickling his stance wider. “Do you know how often I end up running behind you to this or that mission, up stairs and mountains and endless damn Hinterlands hills just---watching  _this?”_ He pulled his hand upward again, his fingers slipping between Dorian’s cheeks. Dorian swallowed hard.

He pulled Dorian’s underwear down his thighs, running his hand over the curve of his ass again. “Yeah,” he said. “Been wanting to do this for a long time.”

He leaned in, parting Dorian’s cheeks, and licked once, deliberately, over the ring of muscle between.

Dorian took a ragged breath, letting his forehead drop against the door and not realizing until the wood felt cold just how hot his face had grown. Bull’s tongue flickered over him again before dipping into him, hot and slick and teasing, and Dorian struggled for something to say, something to claw back just a little of the ground he’d given. “Your tongue,” he started, and it came out strangled, with none of the sharpness he’d tried for. He rallied. “Is—is much cleverer than I gave it credit for, considering the way you use it in conversation.”

Bull pulled back, and Dorian cursed himself, barely concealing a moan at the loss of stimulation. “It is a stupid general who shows all his troops in military parade,” Bull muttered, smug, and immediately thrust his tongue back into Dorian.

Surprise and pleasure shot through Dorian in a confusing mix, leaving his lips in a kind of gasping laugh. “Did you just quote T— _fuck_ , Tevinter battle philosophy at me in the middle of—  _gods,_ Bull—”

Bull made a frustrated, satisfyingly needy noise against him, and Dorian licked his lips. “My trouser pocket,” he managed.

Bull pulled back, breathing heavy, and unwrapped the hand that had been clamped like a vise around Dorian’s hip. Dorian attempted not to feel on the verge of collapse without it.

Bull must have found the little bottle of scented oil because he grunted, amused. “For someone unsure if they were going to come again, you seem very prepared.

Dorian snorted. “Arrogant, to assume I bought it in anticipation of  _you._ ”

“Hn. Point well made. Seems pretty full, though.” There was the sound of a bottle opening, and then a warm, slick feeling as Bull poured the oil down the curve of Dorian’s back, letting it pool in the palm he still had nestled between Dorian’s thighs.

Casually—as if ripping a page from a book—he tore away his silk underwear, and Dorian began to protest but his words caught in his throat, because Bull’s blunt-tipped, dextrous finger ran a slick circle around his entrance, and then pushed in.

He'd clipped his nails, Dorian thought dizzily. He wondered if it had been for him, if Bull had hoped he would— _kaffas_ —come see him, and then scolded himself for the same arrogance he’d just accused Bull of, and then there was no more time for thinking or wondering or accusing, because Bull started moving, slow at first, with building intensity, fucking Dorian with his finger, curling it inside him, and Dorian’s hands clenched and scrabbled against the door.

Bull stood up, running his wide palm up the curve of Dorian’s back, pressing him hard against the wood while he worked him open, a second finger joining the first. Dorian squirmed, his toes curling against the floor, his cock jumping and leaking as he tried to push back against him, struggling against Bull’s palm, Bull's breath hot and ragged against Dorian’s shoulder. He was muttering something, continuous and almost too low for Dorian to hear, most of it Qunlat but here and there a word he could understand; “fuck” and “shit, yes,” and, as Bull withdrew his fingers and replaced them, slow and careful, with his cock: “—better than I’d dreamed—”

Dorian filed that away to think about sometime Bull wasn’t pressing into him, wasn’t peppering sloppy, almost tender kisses all over his shoulders and the nape of his neck, as if Dorian had never been fucked before, as if he was a horse that needed gentling. He reached up, wrapping his fingers around one of Bull’s horns to give himself the stability his traitor legs wouldn’t, and twisted his hips sharply backward.

Bull’s own hips snapped forward and he sank his teeth into the joint of Dorian’s shoulder, and Dorian cried out at the shock of pleasure and pain and the sudden, overwhelming  _heat_ of him, the sweat-slick satisfaction of Bull’s whole body fit flush against his, holding him, filling him, the whole world reduced to their two bodies and the perfect places they were joined.

They were both still for a moment, breathing through it—Dorian could feel Bull’s heart thudding against his back, echoed in his own chest—and then Dorian turned his head to scrape his teeth over Bull’s jaw. “Well?” he challenged, curling his hand again around the pleasant roughness of his horn. “Come on then, Iron Bull,  _fuck_ me.”

Bull’s eye fluttered closed, and he took a breath sharply through his nose. “You’ll be the damn death of me,” he muttered, and obliged.

+

Dorian wrapped his cloak tighter around himself in a vain attempt to keep out the damp. He bit his tongue to keep from complaining—Sera had already given him shit for it—but he didn’t understand how these damned southerners dealt with so much  _weather._ And the smell—he knew that was wearing on all of them. It wasn’t just the stink of bogs, he could deal with that. It was the stench of death, walking.

He watched Adaar free her sword from the skull of a corpse and grimace. She checked the area for more of the things, meeting his eyes; he gave her a nod to signal the all-clear—he could feel the clinging unnatural damp all around them, but nothing moving within it.

Adaar nodded her thanks and pulled a cloth from her belt, running it over the metal of her blade, clearing the dark blood from its surface with the care one would take with a body itself. Dorian closed his eyes and thought longingly of the baths in Skyhold, far away from this cursed, half-sunken town, of clearing himself of any taint of sluggish blood and the trapped, howling souls it represented. In his mind someone took the warm cloth from him, sliding it up his arm, over his shoulder, down.

Calloused hands slid up back the muscle of his back and squeezed, skillfully working through the knots in his shoulders, peeling the tension from him like he’d seen them peel an orange, absent and dextrous. Or. Or taking care of him, like one takes care of a favorite weapon or a prized possession. Something loved.

He felt Bull step up beside him and grudgingly opened his eyes. The Qunari brought his own scent with him, cutting through the scent of death around them. A sharp, musky scent Dorian was coming to know, clean sweat and earth, associated overwhelmingly with sex and with sleep. It grounded him immediately, but not unpleasantly; pulled him back from dangerous daydream and nightmarish discomfort both. “Maker,” he spat, rather than confront the reality of how suddenly and completely more  _comfortable_ he felt just from Bull’s proximity. “Don't you ever bathe?”

Bull rumbled a laugh. “You like it,” he said easily.

Dorian flicked his eyes sideways at him, caught a curiosity in Bull’s face, as if wondering if he’d crossed a line or if he would be indulged. Very well; Dorian could be indulgent. “It is minutely better than the actual stench of rotting flesh,” he admitted, shifting closer to him, and Bull flashed a grin at him and slung an arm across his shoulders.

 _Give him an inch and he takes a mile,_ Dorian thought crossly, relaxing back against his bicep.

Bull waved the hand not toying with the strap of Dorian’s staff-holster at Adaar. “Time for a rest, boss?”

Adaar finished wiping down her blade, running the back of her hand across her forehead. “Yeah,” she said. “Might as well. Let's see what we can do about burning off this damned damp.”

“For once I'm not the one complaining,” Dorian muttered, and felt Bull’s silent laughter in the shaking of his arm.

Later, still tucked under Bull’s arm, he watched Sera fumble with her flint, cursing fog and rain and wood, and the helpful, comforting lick of flame came as easy to him as thought.

+

“Sorry,” Dorian said, “about the curtains.” He licked his lips. “I may have made a mistake.”

Bull raised his eyebrows. “And here I was thinking you did it out of pleasure, not choice.”

Dorian winced. “I did,” he said. Anywhere else, on front of anyone else, he wasn't sure he would have admitted it. “But I may have, ah, inadvertently linked my pleasure, specifically the pleasure you give me, with fire magic.”

Bull looked fascinated. “That's how it works?” He asked. “You think of hot shit and then blam, you incinerate a dragon from the inside?”

Dorian shrugged, a little nonplussed at the description, but gratified that Bull was interested in magic. “It's not how it works for everyone—I'm sure Solas can just like conjure flame based on some inherent knowledge of the concept itself— and not hot shit like how attractive you are,” he said, “but the actual heat of you, your skin, your hands, your mouth—” he broke off, feeling his face warm. “Yes.”

Bull shook his head, chuckling. “Maker’s tits,” he muttered, something very much like awe in his voice, and raised a hand to cup Dorian’s jaw. “You know what I said when I saw you, standing all pretty on that ice dragon’s spine?”

Dorian let him run blunt fingers into his hair. It was nice, the way the nape of his neck fit Bull’s palm. “No,” he said, “just that it was in Qunlat.”

“ _Taarsidath-an halsaam,”_ Bull repeated, his voice eddying around the foreign syllables like water over rough stone. “It means ‘I'm going to pleasure myself later while thinking about this with utmost respect.’”

Dorian stared at him, and then burst out laughing, the lightness of it bubbling up in his chest. “The Qunari have a  _phrase_ for that?” He asked, disbelieving, because there had been a ritual weight to the words, here and on the snowy towertop. “Come up often, does it?”

Bull smiled crookedly at him. It was different than his easy grin, a more complicated expression than his normal joyful baring of teeth. “It's what we say after we kill a dragon,” he said, “but usually it’s about the kill itself, not the one doing the killing.”

Dorian’s mouth was dry. “I see,” he said. He ran his fingertips up and along the muscles of Bull’s arm. “And did you?”

Bull shifted his hand so it was curled loosely around Dorian’s throat, his thumb caressing the corner of his jaw. “ _Shit_ yeah,” he breathed. “You were  _gorgeous._ ”

Dorian’s heart stuttered in his chest and he resisted the urge to push in against Bull’s palm, swallow against him, make him curl his fingers tight. Instead he knocked Bull’s wrist away, looking away from his face. “It was a stupid thing to do,” he said, “and I wouldn’t have had to do it if you hadn’t been so stupid yourself.” It came out bitter, harsher than he’d meant.

Bull let his hand fall to his lap. “Aw, how sweet, you care.”

“I watched you die once and that was  _quite_ enough for me, thanks,” Dorian shot back.

He expected Bull to scoff at him, rumble a denial -  _it’ll take more than a bit of ice to fell the Iron Bull -_ but he was silent, and when Dorian glanced at him he was staring back, his brow quirked in confusion.

Dorian blinked at him.  _Oh, shit._ “You—Adaar didn’t tell you.”

Bull’s eye was sharp under his drawn brows. “No,” he said, “she didn’t.”

Dorian licked his lips. Sitting naked in Bull’s bed was not exactly how he’d expect to tell this story—he’d never expected to tell it at all, he’d done his best to bury it and never think about it again unless he needed it for spells, but here he was, dredging it up over—nothing, Bull was  _fine,_ he hardly had scars. “When Magister Alexius threw us into the future,” he said slowly, “I saw you die.”

Bull blinked slow at him. “Huh,” he said, voice unreadable. “How?”

Dorian smiled at him, but felt it twist into something else. “How else?” He asked unsteadily. “You sacrificed yourself for us, to give us a chance to jump back through the rift. You and Sera both, you—” his voice caught in his throat. “You saved our lives.”

Bull was staring at his knees, and as Dorian watched he ran a hand up over his bare head, between his horns. “Hn. Did I look good doing it?”

Dorian swallowed hard and placed a firmer wall between himself and the memory of Bull, dull-eyed with lyrium madness, breathing heavy, his whole shoulder and side red, red, glowing red as he charged forward, axe swinging. “Yes.”

That made Bull look at him, eye narrowed, in this moment more like a spy than Dorian had ever seen him. “A lie.”

Dorian worked his tongue around a mouth that felt filled with dust. “An attempted kindness,” he explained, and closed his eyes, surrendering to honesty. “You were corrupted. Alexius had given you red lyrium—for months, grew it on you like the Templars. You were far gone enough you—you no longer wished to live.” He shuddered. “You shattered, when they overwhelmed you.”

Bull’s voice, when he spoke, was filled with sudden understanding. “My stunt with the dragon,” he said. “You think I did it on purpose. You think I don’t care if I live or die. Why?” Dorian didn’t answer him, because he thought it was obvious—and he was right; after a moment Bull filled in: “Because I gave up the Qun?”

Dorian opened his eyes. “I know you did it on purpose,” he corrected, “and I also know what it’s like to be—unmoored.”

Bull shook his head, his gaze filled with, of all things,  _sympathy._ “Dorian. I made a choice. Knowing what it would do. I chose to protect what was important to me, and I shouldered the consequences willingly.”

Dorian raised an eyebrow at him, pulling himself back behind the impeccable mask of his face. He didn’t like the combination of the look in Bull’s eye and his tone. “So did I. Leaving Tevinter was my choice.” It was true, to a point—but a choice made under coercion of having one’s desire burned away wasn’t much of a choice at all, and he suspected Bull knew it.

He thought for a moment he would argue, but after a long moment of searching Dorian’s face Bull relented. “My point is, I’m not suicidal,” he said. “I may do stupid shit, but trust me.” He smiled his crooked smile again, the one Dorian wasn’t quite sure how to read. “I got plenty to live for.” He scratched his jaw and cracked his smile open into a deliberate grin. “You know, if almost getting myself killed makes you do the hottest thing I’ve ever seen, it’s not really an incentive for me to  _stop._ ”

Dorian rolled his eyes. “Please. I was covered in grime and sweating like a pig, it could hardly have been attractive.”

Bull leaned forward into his space. “You  _immolated_ a  _dragon_ and came out of it looking like you’d just been  _fucked_ ,” he growled, “pupils blown, hair mussed, still  _twitching_ from it. And now you tell me you did it while thinking of my  _mouth_. What part of that is supposed to be unattractive?”

Dorian squirmed, but Bull stopped him with a hand on each of his thighs, just a suggestion of pressure, a quiet, wordless  _stay_ that made Dorian’s stomach jump. He stayed. “I suppose, when you put it like that—”

“Yeah,” mocked Bull, his breath drifting hot over Dorian’s jaw, “when I put it like that.”

Dorian kissed him, banishing the last thoughts of his death with the hitch of his breath, the shift of his muscle, the laughing-moaning-curse of his voice.

+

“He think you're sweet.”

Dorian turned to look at Sera, who had her knees drawn up to her chest and her face turned toward the sky. She looked uncharacteristically contemplative.

“Who?” he asked. The only “he” they'd discussed that day was Cullen, and that couldn’t possibly be true.

“Bull.” She cast him a look. “‘Sweet under all the bluster,’ he said.”

Dorian raised his eyebrows. “He said this to you?”

She shook her head, looking back at the sky. “Overheard him talking to Adaar. But I wasn’t eavesdropping, they were right out in the open at the inn in Skyhold.”

He frowned at her profile. “Why are you telling me this?”

Sera picked something out of her teeth with one of her knives and examined it. Not for the first time Dorian longed to bring her into the courts back home and set her off like a bomb. “So you could decide how you felt about it inside your own head before you had to do it in front of him.”

“I see,” said Dorian, and turned to follow her gaze upward.

They were miles from anywhere civilized, and the sky was carpeted thick with swirls of stars, so many it was hard to even pick out distinct constellations, but just above them he found the eleven stars that made up Eluvia, her legs crossed comfortably beneath her, peaceful, free of the world’s lustful attentions through the sacrifice of her father. Dorian’s lips twisted, and he tried to overwrite her with her older story, a more distant one: an old Tevinter god, an emblem of human existence understood not through violent, base urges and the veneration of fathers but through mystery and possibility, a space for fascinating questions and their bright answers, for the granting of wishes.

 _Sweet._ He'd been called  _sweet_ before, by women he didn’t want, by men who didn’t mean it. It was one of those words that had always stuck under his skin - too close to veiled insult on the one hand,  _odd, fey,_ and overt on the other— _dumb, useless._ But that had been home, always spoken from northern mouths. Bull wouldn’t consider the first category insulting, and he knew very well that Dorian did not fall within the second.

“The sex is very good,” he said at last. It was an understatement - it was by far the best sex he'd ever had - but Sera didn’t want to know that, and if she did she could hear it from Bull.

“Of course it is.” Sera snorted, as if that had never even been in question. Maybe she already had heard it from Bull. “That why you keep doing it, then?”

It sounded sarcastic, but it wasn’t. Sex could be good without being repeated - that was what Dorian had hoped for, anyway, on that night in Emprise de Lion, a one-time scratch of an itch he couldn’t seem to scratch himself. Not habitual, not a bed and a pair of arms that were starting to feel more and more like refuge and respite, not something that Dorian should  _miss._ “No,” he said. “I—like him, he's—” He spent a while searching for a word that could encompass what Bull was - laughing and fierce and joyous, stubbornly obtuse and beautifully clever, sharp-eyed and soft-hearted and willful as steel. “Easy,” he settled on at last, woefully inadequate.

“Easy,” Sera repeated, and laughed. “The man calls you sweet, and you call him easy! You're sure this ain’t about the sex?”

“I don't mean it like that,” Dorian snapped, flushing. “I mean easy to be around, easy to please, easy to fight beside and-and care about.” He thought of the months Bull had spent flirting with him, his smirks and innuendos. “Though the other kind, as well, alright, yes.”

Sera hummed. “He isn’t, though.”

Dorian blinked at her. “Not easy to be around?” He was under the impression that Sera and Bull had a close, if somewhat baffling, friendship.

“No, idiot, easy to bed.” She sucked her teeth. “Half the gels at Skyhold have been trying for ages, and a quarter of the blokes.”

Something complicated and confused rose in Dorian’s chest. “And he hasn’t—”

Sera shook her head. “Not that I know of, and I hear pretty much everything from my perches.”

“Huh.” Dorian tried to sort through the tightness in his chest at that. Certainly he wouldn’t prefer Bull to be sleeping with other people—the thought smote him with a jealousy that he was surprised by the intensity of, if not its presence at all. But if he weren’t, why? Had he been wrong about the Bull’s appetites? Did that mean his overt sexuality in their interactions had been about Dorian, not just an expression of who he was as a person? “Perhaps I tire him out,” he ventured, as if a few nights whenever they were together on the road or at Skyhold could tire someone with Bull’s stamina.

Sera gave that the consideration it deserved: absolutely none. “Or maybe he means somethin’ by it.” She yawned and stretched, her voice derisive. “Somethin’ more than  _good sex_ and  _easy to be around._ ”

Dorian grimaced. “Don't be ridiculous. Qunari don’t do relationships.”

Sera levelled a look at him over her shoulder. “No? What do you call me and mine then?”

“That's different,” Dorian insisted, because it was. “The Inquisitor is Vashoth.”

“Vashoth, Tal’Vashoth,” Sera shrugged. “Don't sound too different to me.”

Dorian opened his mouth, then closed it again, at a loss.

Sera sighed. “Look,” she said. “I don’t know for sure that's what’s happening. I'm not Cole, I can't read his mind with my demon brain or whatever. I'm just sayin’ it’s worth considerin’, is all.” She stood up. “We're friends, yeah?”

“I'm not going to hurt him, if that's what you mean.” The idea that he could, in any sense but physically, seemed about ten times less ridiculous now than it might have an hour ago.

Sera kicked him lightly in the side of the head. “Not me and him, you ass, me an’  _you._ ”

“Ow,” said Dorian, and then “oh,” strangely touched. “Yes, we’re friends.”

“So,” said Sera. “Y’know. If you want to talk.”

Dorian nodded at her. “Thank you, Sera.”

She raised a hand in lazy goodbye, and he watched her wander down the slope toward her tent.

 _Maybe he means something by it._ Maybe it could mean something. Could  _be_ something. Dorian had no active interest in pursuing anyone else; there were no shortage of new, attractive faces in the Inquisition who might be happy to open their legs for the Herald’s right-hand mage, but he’d always figured he would attempt to get to know them once Bull tired of him. The idea that Bull might  _not_ tire of him—that he might want something of Dorian other than his body and occasional companionship—had never even  _occurred_ to him.

There was a sort of poetry to it, when he pulled his mind back far enough; two men, their peoples locked in an age-old war, each cast out due to frowned-upon affections, finding understanding and physical satisfaction in each other. Finding. What? Love? Love, the right way?

He wanted to laugh but couldn’t, quite. Instead he flopped backward—against the endless damn Hinterlands hills, as Bull would say—and ran a hand through his hair, feeling—off balance, frustrated. Had Bull’s attentions been targeted from the beginning? Had this been a seduction with intent, not just for amusement and pleasure from a convenient and attractive source, but a seduction of Dorian because he was  _Dorian?_ Had he been wrong about the dance they were dancing, had Bull been meeting him on his terms—casual, spontaneous, never structured or planned—not because that was also what he wanted but because that’s what Dorian offered? What did he want?

And once the war that had brought the two outcasts together ended, once the evil was defeated, presuming both of them survived, once they were no longer united by common purpose and common loyalty… what then?

They'd left Bull with his Chargers back at Skyhold. The Inquisitor believed in rest days, even if the Iron Bull didn’t, and had insisted that his men could use some time with him, re-cementing their strategy. Corypheus’ shadow was growing long, and at some point they would have to take the fight to him, and that took armies - well-trained, coordinated, used to each other.

 _Spend some time with your family,_ Adaar had said firmly. She’d glanced at Dorian.  _Make sure your head’s right._

At the time he’d assumed the glance was pitying—after all, she was still bringing him to the Hinterlands, and he had no such warm, welcoming circle to turn to when he remained behind in his tower, just his books. Bull was lucky in that—having grown up with no real family, he could create one from whatever he wished. Now, though, he wondered perhaps if Adaar’s look had been something else.

Was he what Adaar felt Bull needed a rest from? Was he a reason that Bull’s head wouldn’t be right? If so, why in Maker’s name had he never  _said_ anything?

By the time they returned to Skyhold the next day Dorian had worked himself into what his mother used to call a ‘true glower’ _._ He wondered if Sera had intentionally waited until they were almost home to break this news; she was surprisingly astute when she cared enough to pay attention, perhaps she had recognized Dorian’s tendency to overthink.

He found Bull at the tavern, sitting loose and laughing with his boys. He always managed to be the exact opposite of whatever Dorian was feeling - he felt as if his whole body was wound in a hard knot around his confused, frustrated heart, and Bull was expansive, his arms and legs settled wide, sitting in his chair like the Inquisitor on her throne, all easy power and booming laughter.

He was already grinning when he saw Dorian in the doorway, and his mouth settled into something smaller, warmer, his eye glinting gold. “Dorian.”

 _Did you miss me?_ Dorian wanted to ask, wanted it to be arch and playful, a return to their usual banter, but he knew it would come out too sincere, knew it would become in the asking a test, a single point by which Bull would unknowingly confirm or deny Sera’s implication. He found he couldn’t ask at all, not because he was concerned Bull might say yes and complicate this comforting, simple thing they shared, but because all at once he was both terrified and certain that Bull—if he were to know what the question actually meant—would say no.

It was so clear. Seeing him here, among his family, Dalish and Stitches and Rocky and Skinner and Grim and always Krem at his right hand, this was where he _belonged._ This was what he had sacrificed everything for. This was the steady drumbeat that would pull him through this war, through the end of the world and out onto the other side. The idea that he might somehow need Dorian for any part of that, that Dorian would be anything but an entertaining footnote in stories he would tell around fires to men like these for years to come, was laughable.

Bull’s smile faded at his silence. “Hey,” he said, leaning a little forward, “you okay?”

“Yes,” said Dorian, pasting on a smile. “Of course. Please, don’t let me interrupt.”

“Join us,” suggested Krem, gesturing to an open stool between him and Bull. “Have a drink.”

Dorian looked at him. He quite liked Krem, though he’d never been sure how to approach him; he suspected they’d have much to talk about if either of them could figure out how to start. It was easy to shift the narrative he’d created for himself and Bull onto Krem, make it a tale not of romance but of brotherhood. Krem was just as much a Tevinter as he, after all, and perhaps even more of an outlaw. His and Bull’s story was just as much about love. He shifted his gaze back to Bull, to the harsh line of his eyepatch, the scars on his cheek at its edge. A love equally as strong, and much more proven.

He took the stool and the ale Krem offered, taking a long drink to approving grunts from the men around him. Bull immediately shifted to lean his forearm on Dorian’s shoulder, casual. Dorian felt dizzy, caught between the urge to shove him off and the urge to lean over and kiss his palm, or give up entirely and settle himself on Bull’s lap. Insert himself into this warm, comfortable space, as annoyingly and obviously as possible, for however long Bull would let him.

“You were out with the Inquisitor, yeah?” Dalish asked. “Bull said you were hunting Venatori.”

“Successfully so,” Dorian confirmed with satisfaction, glad to be directly addressed so he could more easily ignore Bull. “That’s one more of Corypheus’ supply lines for lyrium shut down. And this time we didn’t have to tramp through a frozen wasteland to do so.”

“Figures I’d be left out for the nice woodland jaunt,” Bull rumbled. “Did the boss say where we’re going next?”

Dorian didn’t look at him, but smiled despite himself at Bull’s assumption that he would be rejoining them. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I believe we’re going west.”

Bull sighed. “Nice west?” he asked plaintively. “The Emerald Graves, maybe?”

Dorian took another sip of his ale. “Hissing Wastes.”

Bull shifted his fingers, absent, so they brushed over Dorian’s cheek, the shell of his ear. “I’m being punished,” he said to the others, spreading his other hand wide. “I’ve done something. She hates me.”

“Kind of messed up that you call the Graves  _nice,_ ” Dalish pointed out. “You know, considering.”

“You think it’s that different than any other battleground?” Stitches asked. “Walk damn near anywhere in Ferelden and there’s a thousand corpses under your feet.”

“Of course it’s different,” said Skinner. “ _Battle_ is not  _slaughter._ ”

“Go down far enough you get the bones of the slaughtered, too,” Rocky cut in, crossing his arms. “You think everyone murdered on the deeproads was a soldier?”

“Or everyone killed during the Blight?” Stitches said.

“It’s different,” Skinner insisted. “Monsters kill because that’s what monsters  _do._ The Graves are a monument to killings by men, a crime of, you know, sentience against other sentience  _—_ ”

The Chargers devolved into an argument over what construed intelligence, and Dorian sat back, sipping his beer and letting himself shift to the sidelines. Bull’s knuckles were still shifting over his cheek, almost soothing, and Dorian nearly jumped when suddenly the Qunari’s lips were at his ear.

“You came right from the road,” Bull murmured, a slight growl in his voice. “I can still smell battle on you. Unwashed. Unshaven.” He thumbed at the corner of Dorian’s jaw, caressing his stubble. “I  _like_ it.”

Dorian swallowed hard, half from the heat of his breath and the open want in his voice, and half out of shock. He hadn’t even thought about it. He hadn’t even  _thought_ about it, coming here to see Bull and his men still drenched in sweat and dust, hadn’t even glanced in a mirror. It was such a stupid thing, such a _small_ thing, and yet it would have been unthinkable a year ago, letting anyone see him as he was and not as he  _wished_ to be seen. And Bull had noticed, and he liked it. He liked Dorian unshaven, he liked Dorian an exhausted, trembling mess from using magic, he liked Dorian bitter and small and grudgingly tucked under his arm in a stinking, undead bog.

He imagined himself back in the doorway, imagined himself asking.  _Did you miss me?_ he’d say, just standing there, not posed or poised or anything but himself.

 _No,_ Bull would say, looking at him from across the circle of his friends,  _but I’m glad to see you now._

It was too much and, overwhelmingly, hideously, not enough.

To his horror he felt tears in his throat and prickling at the back of his eyes. He brushed off Bull’s hand and stood up, interrupting. “I’m sorry,” he said, to Bull, to all of them. “I should go bathe, it’s been a long day.”

Krem gave him a nod, and the others wished him goodnight before resuming their heated argument. He’d made it outside and halfway down the steps to the lower levels when he realized Bull was following him.

He turned, looking up at him. “What are you doing?”

Bull paused at the top of the stairs, a huge, graceful silhouette against the deepening purple sky. “I assumed,” he said, and then: “was that not an invitation?”

Dorian squinted at him, trying to see his face. “Why would you think—” he started, and then stopped, because of course Bull thought. That was how their dance worked, after all; they functioned on implication, on assumption, on unspoken agreement. He sagged. Maker. He was too tired for this. “Bull.”

Bull jogged down the steps to him, his face, when it came into light, openly worried. “Dorian. Did something happen on the road?”

Dorian laughed. “No,” he said. “No, it was a very uneventful few days.” He made a pathetic effort toward a smile. “A pleasant woodland jaunt.”

Bull moved to touch his throat, or maybe his jaw again; Dorian, knowing it would make everything worse, dodged.

“I see,” said Bull. He lowered his hand. “Enjoy the baths.” He smirked, but it was a shallow motion, only moving a few planes of his face. “Think of me.”

Dorian watched him leave, returning to the tavern. He wondered if he would go to bed, or return to the boys; what would he say that Dorian had said? Would he admit the rejection, or claim he’d only gone after Dorian to speak with him a moment? To give him a goodnight kiss?

He gave up on the baths entirely and forced his legs to carry him to his tower room, where he flung himself down on his bed rather than straight off the ramparts to be dashed on the mountainside below.

+

If Adaar were punishing Bull by taking them to the Hissing Wastes, she was doubly punishing Dorian by taking them there and making them investigate dwarven tombs filled with magical riddles about dynasties and legacies and a whole lot of nonsense that felt best left undiscovered. Especially if discovering it meant Dorian running around checking and double-checking dwarven syntax in order to not bring  _ghouls_ down on their heads by lighting the wrong damn veilfire torch.

The only good part was that at least the caves were deep enough in the sands to be blessedly cool. The absolute worst part was that Bull seemed to love them.

“This is real engineering,” he announced to Adaar as Dorian, for the fourth time in as many weeks, scratched dwarven script into a piece of flat stone, too annoyed—or if he were being honest with himself, too proud—to unpack his parchments and admit he couldn’t just do this off the top of his head. Bull gestured to the keystone of the doorway, the interlocking gridwork of the floor. “None of that ‘we’ll get a mage to lift a block’ stuff the way Tevinter does it.”

“Well, pardon us,” Dorian shot back, without much heat. It was easy to fall into banter with Bull until he thought about it, and then it became absolutely impossible.

“I didn’t know you were interested in this stuff, Bull,” said Adaar. She was perched rather disrespectfully atop what appeared to have once been an altar. Sera was sitting between her knees, and Adaar was braiding her hair back from her forehead in Qunari style, waiting for Dorian to do his work. Her sword leaning at her side in case he got a verb case wrong. “When did you study architecture?”

Dorian resentfully lit one of the torches with a muttered word and a memory of visiting his grandmother’s grave, of his sleeve being caught on a rosebush that he’d sworn with all of his ten-year-old heart was, for just a moment, her thin, bony hand.

Nothing happened. Adaar gave him a nod, and Bull relaxed out of his battle-ready stance. “You learn a thing or two about walls when you knock enough of them down.”

Dorian lit the next torch— _who, against their father’s wishes, fought from foolish words and foolish pride_ —with the way the air shimmered above a hot road, heat and the passage of many souls wearing the barrier between worlds thin and translucent. The room remained dim, cool, and demon-free.

“Think about what’s missing from these tombs, though,” Bull mused, running a broad palm up the delicate mosaic of one wall.

Dorian checked his notes on the final two pillars and lit them in quick succession, lingering as little as possible on the memories of the first breach he’d encountered and the feeling of passing through time—transience, substantiation, the shift from real to not-real and back again.

“What?” asked Adaar, standing up and helping Sera to her feet. The archer patted her head, feeling the two completed braids and the one half-done, and laughed, leaving them that way. Adaar grinned and kissed her on the temple, and the two of them went to loot the treasure in the room Dorian’s efforts had revealed.

Bull hummed. “I’ve got a theory,” he said. “Usually in tomb-robbing, there’d be traps, right?”

“You don’t count the imminent ghouls as traps?” Adaar asked, amused. 

“Nah,” said Bull. “I think that stuff was put here later. There’s no magic used in the actual construction, like I said. I think whoever this guy was, they thought just the strength of his name would keep thieves at bay.” He followed Adaar and Sera into the newly opened room. “Pure respect.”

Sera laughed. “Never thought you’d come and sit your arse on their altar, eh?”

Through the narrow doorway, Dorian saw Adaar cock an eyebrow at her girlfriend. “You have better suggestions for what to do with my arse?”

Dorian clenched his fist, extinguished all of the torches at once. He couldn’t tell whether it was Bull and his  _theories_ or the easy intimacy between Adaar and Sera irritating him the most, but it was suddenly like he had sand trapped between his muscle and his skin. He left them to their treasure, pushing his way out of the tomb and directly into the waiting arms of four red Templar.

He cursed and ducked, barely avoiding being skewered by a scythe of red lyrium that served as one of their arms. He swung his staff off his back, ramming its twisted crystalline end against the thing’s face. Stone - either staff or corrupted Templar flesh - splintered and spun into the sand below their feet. Dorian rolled his way out of the way of another blow and called cold to his mind and to his fist, curling his fingers tight and freezing one of the knights solid.

The other three advanced on him, and Dorian flicked his eyes between them. If they stayed together he might be able to call enough ice to skewer them through all at once, but the one on the end was a Shadow, able to pull the illusion of night over itself and vanish from view.

It didn’t have a chance—Dorian heard a familiar yell and the shadow exploded into red mist, Bull’s axe emerging from the cloud in a swift, vengeful arch that connected with the next, as well. Dorian smirked to himself and sent a javelin of ice up through the last one’s jaw as Bull finished his off.

Bull left his axe in its corpse and crossed to him. “You hurt?”

Dorian shook his head, pushing his hair out of his face. “They must have seen us come down here earlier,” he said, keeping his voice calm over the beat of his heart. “Laid in wait.”

Bull nodded. “Sorry for interrupting,” he said. The sun had set while they were parsing runes inside the tomb, and his face was indistinct in the gathering dark. He jerked a thumb at the Templar skewered on spear of ice at his side. He was still twitching, the translucent tip of the spear where it emerged from the top of his skull dulled by the red of his blood and the lyrium both. “I see you had it under control.”

Sera slid through the door, bow drawn, but she lowered it when she saw the two of them, surrounded by a circle of red. Adaar followed her out of the tomb, watching them.

“Yes, well,” said Dorian, and then had no idea what to say next.

Bull reached out and tousled his hair, just a brief, fond touch, and left him alone.

Dorian found it much harder to sleep that night than he’d expected. Pushing through the sands of the Wastes was hard work, and usually he fell relatively quickly into dreamless sleep once the unrelenting sun no longer pounded against his shoulders and his skull, but tonight the release from the heat only seemed to make his bones ache with loss. He gave up at some point after midnight, getting up to check the crystal at the tip of his staff and make sure it hadn’t been damaged. When he’d determined that it was still whole, he passed the time checking through the requisition lists, tallying the stores of deathroot, lazurite, and vandal aria to be sent back to Skyhold in the morning.

“You’ve stopped using fire.”

Dorian didn’t turn. “We’re in the desert,” he said shortly. “These things are used to the sun. Ice is more effective.”

Bull stepped closer. Dorian could feel him, had felt him the moment he stepped out of his tent. He wondered when that had happened, when his intentional awareness of his allies in combat had become an unconscious, ambient awareness of them at all times. He ignored how much more active and distracting it was in regard to Bull.

“What do you think about?”

Dorian turned, leaning against the requisitions table. “What?”

Bull had his thumbs tucked in his belt. The clouds—never even hinted at during the day—moved swiftly across the desert at night, making the moonlight shift over his skin. He was stripped down to nothing but simple breeches, an understandable reaction to the heat but one that made it difficult for Dorian to look at him without remembering the way his abs jumped at the scrape of Dorian's teeth against them when he went to his knees.

“What do you use,” Bull repeated as Dorian dragged his eyes upward again, “to call ice?”

Dorian crossed his arms. “The wind,” he said, “from the highest parts of Skyhold, where it bites through any clothing, any armor. The shock of cold when you wash your face from a ewer that’s frozen over in the night. Plunging into a pool fed from snow-melt.”

Bull nodded, and crossed to the table at his side, examining the supplies laid out there with apparent interest. “Is that all?”

Dorian let himself study his profile in the light of the lantern. He looked tired, he realized with a start, and then immediately felt stupid at the extremity of his reaction. Of course Bull could be tired; he was a person, not a god. But there was something about seeing it on his face—the slight downward turn on his mouth, the weariness in his eye—that made Dorian’s chest ache.

“No,” he said at last. “I think about the way I felt when I first reached Haven, when I first knew I would be joining the Inquisition. I think about the promises I made myself in that room, pressing my forehead to cold stone. The way I swore not to let myself ruin this opportunity the way I had my previous life, not to let my personal faults and passions get in my own way. The way I honed myself like a knife, clean and sharp and. Alone.”

Bull turned to face him, raising an eyebrow. “Fire sounded more fun.”

Dorian licked his lips, watched Bull’s gaze dip to his mouth. “It was,” he admitted quietly.

Bull lifted a hand and ran his fingers up Dorian’s jaw to curl around the back of his neck. Dorian swallowed, not moving, and Bull leaned down and kissed him.

He may have intended it to be slow or chaste, but Dorian had no idea, because from the first press of Bull’s lips it was like Dorian’s hindbrain took over, like all of the want and frustration baked into him by the sun was released at once, following the only pathways it knew when kissing Bull—to kiss like they were in the middle of fucking, open-mouthed and moaning. He licked between Bull’s wide lips, sucking at his tongue, filthy and desperate, and Bull made a strangled noise, his hand clenching tight in Dorian’s hair. He surged forward, pinning Dorian’s hips to the table, and Dorian bit down on his lip, hard.

Bull broke the kiss, his lip still caught between Dorian’s teeth for a satisfying moment before he grinned, pulling it free. “Hi,” he said, so close, his nose still brushing Dorian’s.

Dorian reached up, cupping his jaw with both hands, keeping him close. “Hello,” he said, feeling breathless.

Bull kissed him again, hard enough to make Dorian’s toes curl in his boots but slow, like he was mapping out Dorian’s mouth, reminding himself of his taste. “Gods,” he said, finally, when Dorian let him. “I missed you.”

Dorian froze, his heartbeat—already wild in his chest—now frenzied. “I,” he said weakly, “we’ve been travelling together for weeks—”

Bull pulled back, his hand shifting down to Dorian’s shoulder, his thumb shifting over the joint between his shoulder and his neck. Their hips were still flush; Dorian could still feel the heat of him. It made it hard for him to focus on Bull’s face. “You’ve been here,” Bull said slowly, “and I’ve been here, but we haven’t been travelling together.”

Dorian wanted to kiss him again, wanted to wrap his legs around Bull’s hips and make him lose his train of thought, wanted to never have this conversation, never have to explain that they were going to fuck and then he was going to pull back again, that the easy comradeship they’d had was ruined because it was too close to something he couldn’t have. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean,” said Bull firmly, “that I  _missed_ you. That it drives me up the damn wall to be looking at you,” he shifted both palms down Dorian’s chest, his callouses dragging over Dorian’s nipples through his thin, linen sleeping shirt, “and not be able to  _touch._ It drives me wild to not talk to you anymore, not like we used to, to not know what you’re thinking.”

Dorian huffed a laugh, heat coiling low in his stomach at the way it made Bull curl his hands around his sides. “You’ve never known what I was thinking.”

Bull’s mouth twisted. “Maybe not,” he acknowledged, “but I can tell when you’re lying.”

Dorian swallowed, caged by his hips and his fingers, waiting.

Bull’s eye searched his face. “What do you want?”

Dorian raised his eyebrows. “You can’t tell?” He pitched his voice low, amused, the way he knew Bull liked. “I want you to fuck me.”

“Yeah,” Bull breathed, his eye darkening, and for a moment Dorian thought it would work, but then Bull continued, “but that’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

Dorian cursed at himself. He squirmed free of Bull’s hands and his hips both, stalking off to the far side of the ashes of the cooking fire. How dare he? How dare Bull put him in this place with no exit, demand answers that he didn’t want to hear? Ask questions that Dorian would not ask of him?

He sighed, giving up. “I want to matter _,_ ” he said, too softly, the words catching in his throat.

“What?” Bull asked.

Dorian turned on his heel. “I want to  _matter,_ ” he snarled, furious, his mouth filling suddenly with the bitter saliva that preceded bile, his whole body in revolt. “I want to be something other than a, a pleasant memory, a fucking footnote in someone else’s story.”

Bull stared at him. “Dorian. You’re the right-hand mage of the Inquisitor and one of the most powerful—not to mention famous—magic-users in Ferelden, of course you matter. Maryden has at least one song about you already, it’s actually pretty good—”

Dorian choked on a laugh, spat to the side. “And before this,” he said mockingly, “I was a princeling of Tevinter, set to wield vast amounts of political and magical power. Set, likely, to wipe out dozens of  _your_ people. I suppose that counts as mattering, too.” He shook his head. “I want to matter for  _who_ I am, amatus, not  _what._ ”

The endearment slipped out of his mouth before he could stop it, but Bull didn’t seem to catch it, or maybe he didn't know what it meant. He frowned. “Are what and who you are so different?”

Dorian stared at him. “What?”

Bull drifted around the fire-pit toward him. “You’re not that murderous Tevinter princeling. They tried to make you into him, but you resisted. You told me yourself. You fled your country not to take on some other title, not to fill some other role, but because of who you are as a person. Because you’re stronger than the bonds that tried to hold you.” He shook his head. “You earned your place in this war because of who you are, too. Without you—not just without  _a mage_ but without  _you,_ Dorian, without the memories you have that shape the magic you use, the Inquisitor would have been lost before she even  _was_ the Inquisitor, before the war ever truly began. You act like the things that we choose you for have nothing to do with you, like the role you play wasn’t built for you, like it was empty before you arrived and you just stepped into it by chance.”

“It was,” Dorian protested. “I did—”

“No,” Bull insisted. “Not with Adaar, and not with me.”

Dorian flinched. “Careful,” he said bitterly, “I don’t have the same knack with liars as you, I’ll trick myself into believing you.”

Bull’s frown darkened. “You should believe me,” he said. “What reason have I given you to doubt that I want—”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that you  _want_ me,” interrupted Dorian loudly. “I felt your interest quite clearly only moments ago—”

“—anything and everything you’ll give me?” Bull continued over him, louder.

Dorian stared at him, his mouth still open.

Bull was smiling, that strange, hopeful, rueful smile Dorian realized now he’d only ever seen directed at him. “I can’t pretend to understand the way romance is supposed to work,” he said. “I can’t pretend to know what the future holds, where either of us will end up after this or whether we’ll both go out in a blaze of glory but.” He shrugged, like what he was saying wasn’t absolutely unbelievable. “You’re the best damn thing to ever happen to me.”

It took Dorian a full minute to unstick his tongue from his throat. “Now who’s taking himself out of the equation?”

Bull blinked. “Huh?”

Dorian advanced on him, barely feeling the sand beneath his feet. “I didn’t  _happen to you_ ,” he said sharply, “you made yourself an incredibly hot nuisance who was absolutely impossible to ignore.”

Bull stared down at him, his smirk growing. “You know how surprised I was when you actually took me up on it?” he asked, almost accusatory. “The  _months_ I spent showing off for you, cutting Venatori in half, chopping wood shirtless, and you choose the valley as cold as a witch’s armpit to succumb to my charms—”

Dorian wound his arms around Bull’s neck, grinning up at him. “I may have been at least half motivated by your body heat.”

Bull gasped in mock offense, his hands settling on Dorian’s hips. “And of course the time after was you being  _so_ concerned about nursing me back to health, and the first time on the Storm Coast you were just welcoming me back to the road, and the next few times at Skyhold you were helping me test my new bed, and then I was helping  _you_ test  _your_ new bed, and then in Crestwood it was because I smelled better than corpses.”

“Yes, and the second time on the Storm Coast was a distraction so Sera could steal your absolutely hideous pants and burn them,” Dorian responded, semi-truthfully.

Bull shook his head, his face trying for disbelief and betrayal but settling somewhere between laughing and awed. “ _Used,_ ” he exclaimed. “Again and again, under false pretenses.” He ran his hands down to squeeze Dorian’s ass. “What about the time you set my curtains on fire?”

Dorian looked up at him through his lashes. “Mm, no, that was just because I really love riding your cock.”

Bull’s hands spasmed against him. “ _Dorian_.”

Dorian laughed at him, running a hand over his chest and up his throat, and then sobered a little. “Truthfully I know almost as little of romance as you,” he said slowly. “It wasn’t as if I had much chance to indulge in it in any real way in Tevinter, and the paths that were open to me were so steeped in intrigue no one involved would know a real emotion if it stabbed them in the back.” He took a breath. “But I know the idea that you didn’t care for me for more than sex made me miserable, and I know that the most comfortable I have ever been has been in your bed.”

Bull was watching him, face open and soft, the moonlight turning his eye the silver of good, dependable steel. “So,” he said.

“So,” said Dorian. He smiled. “Take me there?”

Bull picked him up easily, his hands under Dorian’s ass, and grinned when Dorian yelped and wrapped his legs around his waist. “With pleasure.”

**Author's Note:**

> hope y'all enjoyed
> 
> title is a mashup of lyrics from neko case's "i wish i was the moon" which is a v good dorian pavus feelings song really


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